Carol Spindel

To understand the legal strategy Native activists are using against the Washington Football Team, read my chapter on the first court case.

Dancing at Halftime: Sports and the Controversy Over American Indian Mascots

Five Things Only I Care About (1.1MB) An Illinois Sampler: Teaching and Research on the Prairie, edited by Burton and Winkelmes, University of Illinois Press, 2014.

Five Things Only I Care About -- an essay about teaching at University of Illinois and writing Dancing at Halftime.

Reviews:

"Spindel's work is a marvelous voyage that prepares the reader for further adventures that are clearly not designed to reveal but to suggest. . . . In explaining white America to Itself, the book is an unqualified success."

--American Indian Quarterly

"An unusual and unfailingly interesting examination of a clash of cultures."

--Sports Illustrated

"Readers of this very important, highly readable book will have a new understanding of the insidiousness of racism and the ease with which mass marketing can create new mythology. Highly recommended."

--Library Journal

"Although a great deal has been written about the controversy of using fake Indians to get fans pumped up at football games, it took an entire book to give full vent to the subject. Carol Spindel does this admirably and evenhandedly."

--Chicago Tribune

"The whole is strongly and beautifully written."

--Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

"With clear and compelling language, Spindel shows us how the naïve rituals of a previous era can become the insensitive orthodoxy of today. I can't imagine a more readable--or a more even-handed--exploration of the mascot issue. This should be required reading for anyone committed to building a new sense of community in the United States."

--Frederick Hoxie, editor of The Encyclopedia of North American Indians

"Honest, insightful, and a well balanced analysis of this complicated problem. Spindel has discovered the confusing reservoir of tangled emotions that underlie American attitudes towards Indians--and toward themselves. A 'must read'."

--Vine Deloria, Jr., Professor of History Emeritus, University of Colorado, Standing Rock Sioux

"Yesterday's racism we recognize and we are embarrassed by it. Today's racism we often do not recognize until we read something like Carol Spindel's clear and fascinating message in Dancing at Halftime."